"So that might be achieved by for example, increasing licence fees for sellers of tobacco products and I think we can also do more to extend smoke-free environments.

"We don't do enough to recognise that selling tobacco products is not a right, it's a privilege, these are products that kill one in two long-term users.

"So we do need to see a fee that is appropriate for the level of harm that's caused and certainly in many cases, we're seeing fees in the order of hundreds of dollars rather than thousands of dollars which might be a more appropriate starting point."

A report published in the American Medical Journal this week says despite progress in reducing the prevalence of daily smoking since the 1980s, the number of smokers has "steadily increased" worldwide due to population growth.

The report says: "Although many countries have implemented control policies, intensified tobacco control efforts are particularly needed in countries where the number of smokers is increasing."

It says between 1980 and 2012, the estimated prevalence of daily smoking for men declined from 41.2 per cent to 31.1 per cent, and women fell from 10.6 per cent to 6.2 per cent.

But it says more than 50 per cent of men are smoking in countries including Indonesia, Laos, Papua New Guinea and East Timor.

50th anniversary of landmark US report linking cigarettes to cancer

Saturday marks 50 years since the US Surgeon General Luther Terry released his report linking cigarettes to cancer.

Simon Chapman is the Professor of Public Health at the University of Sydney.

"This was the second big review after the English reviewed the evidence, which pulled everything together, all the research that existed and said 'this is a major health problem', it set the scene for years to come and has caused literally hundreds of millions of people to give up smoking," Professor Chapman said.

"The Surgeon General is the leading office that pulls together reports about health in the United States and they've produced many reports over the years on smoking.

"I think people had understood for many years, people had understood expressions like smoking 'stunted your growth', but people had never really understood that smoking was a leading cause of death, in fact it kills more people in the world today than any other single cause.

"This really consolidated that evidence and said that the science was in on it, that smoking killed, as we know today, about half of people who are long term users."

In 1964, smoking rates sat around 70 per cent for men and 30 per cent of women.

Since then, smoking rates among adults have more than halved, with current figures putting the smoking rate at 17.5 per cent.

Professor Chapman says there was little response in Australia at the time to the report.

"I think that many people found it difficult to take on board that smoking was as harmful as the report concluded, but in the years since that message has been amplified over and over again," he said.

"There is really nothing in the history of medical science which is so conclusively demonstrated as the relationship of smoking to disease.

"Publicity which the report attracted immediately started causing many people to give up smoking, if you looked at what was happening particularly post-war, smoking was going up and up and up, and when those reports came out it started immediately going down and it's been going down ever since.

"The tobacco industry were, predicably, very aggressive in their criticisms of the report. They started hiring tamed scientists who travelled around the world including to Australia, saying 'Oh, it's air pollution that's doing this, it's not cigarette smoking', it was genetic and issues like that were raised continually by them.

"Unfortunately in Australia we had to wait 10 years for the government to take its first action which was to put very tiny health warnings on the bottom of cigarette packs.

"There was a lot of political pressure, there were a lot of connections of the tobacco industry into government, some of our leading politicians, documents show, had friendly relations with the tobacco industry at the time and so I think that they were reluctant to act against an industry which was in their own words, just another business."